Month: January 2010

Naaa really, this was a great book – and man what an ending. Seriously, the ending just left me thinking some pretty deep things about humanity… how just maybe a twist and a turn somewhere in our all of past could have sent us all down a much much much “different” path. I never expect any deep thoughts when reading adventure, suspense etc fiction, so finding it within these pages was an added bonus.

So again, we have the same subterannean theme that I’ve found in Reliquary, Cabinet of Curiosities… but it’s not really presented to the reader until maybe 80% of the way through the book. And when it does, it comes hard and fast and you feel like you are in the claustrophic and terrifying darkness. Most of the book is spent in the endless seas of corn and ultra small-town-go-nowhere middle America (complete with a turkey packing plant). Preston & Child do a knockup job of transporting you there and it’s not as dull a setting as you would think – I personally had very low expectations as I grabbed it from the store shelf, and found myself proved wrong.

Agent Pendergast is back and shows some more human aspects than in the other books, which for me was welcome. I’ve got nothing against the Pendergast character, he just seems a little too distant and aristocratic at times for me to fully embrace and relate to him. He’s paired with a new sidekick – a goth teenager that compliments nicely, I found her a great way to put myself in the scene. Again, reading the jacket cover I didn’t know how they could pull off mixing those two character types together, but they did.

By far, my favorite of the Preston and Child novels. Interestingly, this wasn’t carried at my local library and (reader be warned) it very well may because of some intensely gruesome and spooky passages.

Like this:

My experience with Winhost.com was a short three months, but they impressed me. I used the monthly ASP.Net hosting plan – $4.95 for 1 domain name until I tried out M6.Net and gave it a good side by side review. Ultimately, I chose M6.net because for about $3 a month (paid over 2 years) they let you host 2 domains on your account. It really just came down to a frugal matter of costs for this site, which in essence is just a hobby for me. The way I looked at it, over a 2 year period I could host two sites for about $90 on M6.Net vs $240 on Winhost.com.

That said almost everything else I found about Winhost was better – the servers were faster, Blogengine.net installed dirt simple (even in MSSQL mode), heck they even let you hook up IIS7 manager to administer your site! Winhost also has MSSQL 2008 support, which you can hook up SQL manager (or management studio express) too… sooo much more user-friendly than the typical web interfaces a lot of these hosting providers give you.

If I was setting up a site for a business, hands down I would’ve chosen Winhost over M6, and I am a little sad to let them go. Look for a review of M6.Net when I have a chance to let this blog settle in on their servers.